


Love Will Never Meet It, It Just Gets Sold for Parts

by thereweregiants



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: M/M, Post-Fall of Overwatch, Suicide reference, Unhealthy Relationships, dubcon, runon sentences as a vague form of style
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-07
Updated: 2020-05-07
Packaged: 2021-03-02 20:28:08
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,886
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24052867
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thereweregiants/pseuds/thereweregiants
Summary: Some relationships continue even after death.Even after they shouldn't anymore.
Relationships: Jesse McCree/Reaper | Gabriel Reyes, Jesse McCree/Soldier: 76 | Jack Morrison
Comments: 18
Kudos: 52





	Love Will Never Meet It, It Just Gets Sold for Parts

**Author's Note:**

> this is, I dunno. one of those odder ones, I guess. broken dicks, lack of punctuation, you know. the usual. 
> 
> title from BRMC's [Beat the Devil's Tattoo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVeGUVOc9gc)  
> written to the faint sounds of ACNH music because I was too lazy to actually turn my switch off

Jesse doesn’t remember the actual moment his arm is severed.

Doesn’t remember who did it, or even what did it. It was presumably an omnic, both because that’s who he was shooting at right then and because it’s taken off so very cleanly. It’s below his elbow - he can lift it up to see red meat and two white bones and the faintest of marbling. Like a good steak, he thinks dizzily before remembering that steak doesn’t bleed like this, not even when it’s as rare as...

Someone he knew liked rare steak. He can’t quite recall names at the moment.

Someone like the voice that’s caressing his ears right now, telling him that it’s okay, Jesse will be okay, he’ll be taken care of. It’s familiar, maybe the most familiar thing he knows, but despite everything somewhere deep down he knows that the voice shouldn’t be there. That the voice is wrong. 

His head starts to clear, unexpectedly, and he looks at his arm to see a thin thread of black smoke dance its way around the end and then slide _inside_ somehow. Jesse doesn't feel anything but the bleeding slows, slows. Stops with just a few errant drips. How, he murmurs. How?

It can't stay like that, the voice says unapologetically. It needs to be sealed off against infection. Stopping it from the inside will only do so much.

Jesse wants to ask what the voice means but then it’s nothing but searing heat against that perfectly marbled rare flesh, and Jesse’s throat hurts so much that he doesn’t know if he’s screaming or long past the point of sound. He breathes into black fabric that smells of ash and ozone and sex and his arm is on fire. When he collects himself, braces himself enough to look down again, he sees a piece of metal pressed to the abrupt end of his arm, still glowing slightly and charring the edges of the flesh. It no longer bleeds, though, even as the bit of smoke threads its way back out. The hand holding the metal to Jesse’s arm is all shining steel claws and he can feel a matching set tracing through his hair gently, so gently.

You’re dead, Jesse finally says after his breathing has slowed to silent, hitching sobs.

Just because I’m dead doesn’t mean I’ll stop taking care of you. The breath against the side of his face is scented with rot and the marigolds Jesse laid down on an empty grave. 

Jesse closes his eyes and lets himself drift away because he knows the voice is right.

-x-x-x-x-x-

Jesse McCree isn’t a man who lets himself get saved, but it happens all the same. 

He’ll be standing in the middle of a perfectly normal shootout and then suddenly bullets are going into smoke and never coming out again and there are too many arms with too many guns and before he knows it he’s backed into a corner with Gabriel in his space and beyond. Hands running over him, making sure that all his limbs - or the reasonable facsimiles thereof - are in their proper places, that there are no holes where there should not be holes.

Hands making sure that Jesse can’t escape, can’t go anywhere. When he tries he finds he just - can’t move. Desperate shoving against immutable fact: that Gabriel wants Jesse to be right here, right now, and what Jesse’s intentions are don’t really matter. 

Gabriel’s hands that make sure Jesse is in one piece soon will turn into Gabriel’s hands inside of Jesse’s clothes and they’re still not letting Jesse go anywhere. It’s not that in the past twenty years Jesse has ever turned Gabriel down for anything, but it’d be nice to at least have the illusion of an option. 

His fingers may be black and twisted and clawed now instead of thick and brown with too-short nails, but they still know how to make Jesse fall apart, a tumbling tower of pieces that Gabriel cut apart in the first place and never was too careful about putting back together. 

When Gabriel tells Jesse that Jesse belongs to him, that he’s his now and forever, that death won’t ever keep them apart, Jesse finds himself nodding despite himself, head bobbing helplessly and hands reaching for complicated belts even as he knows he shouldn’t, as he knows that it’s not right. Not right anymore, maybe not right ever. 

He still ends up weak and trembling every time, clutching at a black coat with words that echo with the hiss of an extinguished fire murmured into his ears. 

-x-x-x-x-x-

The first time Jesse moseys out of Soldier 76’s current bolthole with a sway in his hips and a sticky-salt smile on his lips, no one notices.

The second time he does it, Gabriel throws him into a wall and breaks his collarbone. 

He shoves himself close to Jesse, smoke voice ragged and wordless and claws digging deep until they hit muscle. Jesse offers neither explanation nor excuse, just leans against the wall and grits his teeth as bone grinds against bone and the angry, needy, inhuman sounds that come from Gabriel’s throat scrape against the exposed nerves.

Are you not getting enough? Do you want more? Question after question growled out as clothes are rent and pushed aside.

 _Why him?_ is the question unvoiced that hangs over them like a cloud.

Jesse was emptying himself into Jack Morrison not thirty minutes ago but under Gabriel’s cruel grip he stirs, hardens. Relentless, painful, but he fills with blood and want because it’s Gabriel and what else can he do?

Gabriel long ago learned to look into the tangled mess that was Jesse McCree and pluck out the hair-thin strand of need that will always be there for Gabriel.

Jesse is on fire with pain and something like desire as Gabriel strips his cock ruthlessly, bites his sharp teeth into Jesse’s shoulder right over the shattered bone. He doesn’t know if it’s agony or pleasure that sends him into orgasm, he lost track long ago with Gabriel. With Re- with _him._

After he’s spattered Gabriel’s ostentatious leather outfit with white, Gabriel doesn’t let him go. Rubs a desiccated fingerpad over the red, oversensitive head until Jesse squirms, then casually slides a claw into the slit and beyond. Jesse stays very, very still. 

Jesse’s cock can’t quite decide whether to shrink back into himself with fear or to valiantly try and fill with blood yet again, and he loses track of what his body is doing when Gabriel starts to whisper against his skin. 

Jesse is his, doesn’t he understand that? All Gabriel wants to do is keep him safe, so very safe. Jesse will always be safe with Gabriel. Not with anyone else. He saved Jesse from bleeding out, saved him from a hundred cuts and a thousand bullets. They belong together.

The mask tilts up slightly, and things that aren’t lips press against Jesse’s own. He swallows down against the rise in his throat at it, but nods at Gabriel’s words because at the core of it he’s right, of course. He’s always been Gabriel’s. 

He must have said that out loud because Gabriel is nodding along himself. You get it, he says, and pulls the claw out from inside Jesse’s dick, leaving behind a wisp of smoke. Don’t worry baby, now we’ll both be sure of it, he murmurs as he tucks Jesse back into his pants and zips him up.

Jesse doesn’t know what he means until late that night when he pulls himself out to piss. He can’t feel his cock. He can feel it in his hand, of course: laying there fat and tan and uncut and looking just as it always does. From the inside though, nothing. It’s like when he sleeps on his arm wrong and it lies there dead until it comes back to life with TV static of nerves awakening. Or before he got his prosthetic, how he was sure that he arm would be there and then it...wasn’t. Like when his arm first came off and bled and then stopped and - oh.

He pisses, relieved to find that this, at least, still functions. 

When Jesse wakes in the morning hard like every other morning, he thinks for a minute that it all was just an odd dream. Then he wraps a hand around his erection and feels nothing, like he’s touching someone else’s flesh. Despite frantic stroking it wilts after a while, like he had never touched it at all.

Gabriel always did have to have the last word.

-x-x-x-x-x-

The next time Jesse runs into Jack he shoves him against a wall, swallows him down as Jack continues to fire his rifle over a pile of broken concrete. He makes him come, then shoves spit wet fingers into him and gets him off again.

I was in the middle of something you know, Jack says mildly as he reaches a hand down to pull Jesse up. His face is blank with the visor on but Jesse’s learned the nuances of his altered voice at this point. 

When a hand presses against Jesse’s groin and finds only softness Jack takes off the mask so he can raise an eyebrow. Jesse shakes his head. Don’t ask, he grumbles, and Jack doesn’t. He just shoots a Talon agent creeping up behind them in the head, presses a hard kiss to Jesse’s lips, and is gone with a glint of sunlight on red plastiglass.

A few weeks later they’re in a bed, and Jack quizzically pokes at Jesse’s lifeless dick, having tried his level best for a good half hour to get it to do anything. 

Don’t bother, Jesse says grumpily, and rolls over to find his pants.

Jack lets him get dressed, laying naked and shameless in bed as he watches Jesse. Goddamn Gabriel, he says as Jesse shoves Peacekeeper in her holster, and Jesse only pauses for a moment before continuing to get dressed.

-x-x-x-x-x-

You don’t have to get me off and leave, you know, Jack says from where he’s leaning up against the cracked window, cigarette stolen from Jesse hanging off of his lower lip.

Jesse keeps pulling his pants up, wraps his traitorous body back in it’s comfortable leather confinement. He pulls out Smile Number 35, the one crooked slightly to the side paired with looking up through his lashes. Why else would I be here, he says easily and slips out the door.

When Jesse is pressed up against an ivy-covered wall later, painting the leaves with a moan as he comes on nothing but Gabriel pounding into him, he sags backwards in exhaustion. It’s not physical, it’s something deeper than his bones, deeper than the marrow inside of them.

Something slithers its way out of Gabriel’s mask to lap at the tears on Jesse’s face.

-x-x-x-x-x-

It continues until it doesn’t.

It continues until Jesse finds himself sitting on the edge of this week’s bed with his bare wrist resting on one knee and his favorite knife resting on the other. Gabriel slips in through the cracks of the door and the pieces of the now-broken knife are tossed in a corner before Jesse’s tired brain can process it. 

The same words as ever are pressed into his eardrums, into the folds of his brain like a needle scratching the grooves of a record. Jesse doesn’t want to be Gabriel’s anymore, he realizes as his fingers clutch at the sheets and he moans despite himself. He doesn’t want to be anyone’s. He doesn’t even want to be his own. 

He dabs half-heartedly at the come on his softening dick as smoke drifts out the window, thinking in a vaguely mournful fashion that this might be the last time he really has sex. If this is what his life is reduced to, though - is it even worth it?

Is anything?

Jesse works. Makes money. Has tea with Ana in one hemisphere, runs into Genji in the other. His former teammate looks so good, so healthy and calm that Jesse nearly runs to find a battle right there and then just so the comforting black smoke will come to blanket him. Instead he hugs him goodbye and types a message to a number he doesn’t dare save anywhere.

He knocks on the door of a nondescript apartment a few days later, picks the lock when there’s no answer. When Jack comes in several hours later wearing a baseball cap pulled low over his eyes and a leather jacket, he just raises an eyebrow before starting to put his groceries away.

Can I stay here for a while? Jesse asks from the corner of the couch he’s tucked himself into, and he doesn’t recognize his own voice.

Sure, Jack says after a beat. Get your goddamn feet off of the coffee table.

Jesse does.

-x-x-x-x-x-

Jesse uses Jack’s place as a home base but they don’t team up. They have different priorities, different contacts, different methods. Jesse pulls a few jobs with no problem, gets enough money that he can shove some at Jack and assuage his guilt, tell himself that he’s just a tenant. Jack just sighs and puts the money in the box he keeps cash in for bribes and tells Jesse to come to bed.

It’s okay until it’s not.

It’s okay until Jesse’s in Dorado and he’s pointing a gun at a guy who’s pointing back. They’re not going to shoot each other, it’s just how it’s done here. Guns ‘til you’re done negotiating, then over to the bar where you buy each other shots and you get a piece of paper with an address and a name slipped into your pocket.

But it’s not going how it’s supposed to because the man with the gun pointed at Jesse is surrounded by blackness and then slumping to the ground with a broken neck and his henchmen are running with fear. Not that it does them any good, none of them make it more than fifty feet.

A gust of chill wind and Jesse’s wrapped up in arms that he struggles his way out of. Stop. Fuckin’ - stop it, now, you asshole.

But you’re safe now, Jesse.

I wasn’t in any danger in the first place, you dick. Jesse can already feel himself stirring in his pants and he curses the conditioned response he has, focuses on the issue at hand.

Jesse I -

You need - _we_ need to stop this. All of it.

The bone mask tilts to the side, curiously. Too sharp, too abrupt to be quite human. Why?

Jesse laughs, and it’s cracked. Fractured and starting to be pieced back together and here’s his past ready to scatter the bits once more. Because you’re not Gabriel anymore, Gabriel wouldn’t do this.

Of course I am. Nothing has changed, I’m still your Gabriel.

The Gabriel I knew, that I - he would never say things like that, Jesse says as he lifts up his gun and fires it into the eye of the mask at point blank range.

The bone of the masks’ eyesocket is cracked but not shattered, and as the echoes of the shot fade away from where they bounce from building to building there’s the faint sound of metal scraping against something harder. Gabriel tilts his mask up slightly with one hand, spits a misshapen bullet into the palm of the other that he then tosses at Jesse’s chest. It falls forgotten to the ground as Jesse stares at him.

What are you now? he whispers.

Gabriel stands there, still. Stiller than any human could. I’m not quite sure anymore, he says finally.

You’re not him. We’re not - us, any more. You need to stop this, stop bein’ around me. Stop protectin’ me.

Gabriel - Reaper? Gabriel? There should be a footnote here somewhere, a parenthetical that could make the faintest stab at identity - takes a step back, and then another. If that’s what you really want, then I won’t.

Okay.

But Jesse - you understand what that means, now.

Something in Jesse that’s been holding him up since he was seventeen dissolves and he feels tired, so tired. Yeah, I get it. They’re both silent for a moment as a faint wisp of nanites and smoke slips out from underneath Jesse’s armor and twists on the wind until it vanishes beneath a bone white mask.

Reaper walks away, and Jesse watches him, watches until the smoke blends into the dust in the air and his eyes hurt from trying to tell where one starts and the other begins. 

-x-x-x-x-x-

Some time later Jesse curls into Jack’s side, damps down his skin and the sheets with tears. His cock is half hard at being pressed so close to the other man’s warm flesh but he can’t even enjoy it.

Later he stares at the blank ceiling as Jack turns over. He’s going to kill me now, you know, he says conversationally. 

Jack shoves his head further into the pillow, scars creasing deeper and making him seem older than his years. Join the club, he mutters unsympathetically, but the hand that settles gently on Jesse’s hip betrays his tone.

Jesse looks past Jack out the window, and all the shadows seem so very dark.

**Author's Note:**

> come yell with or at me on [twitter](https://twitter.com/thereweregiants)


End file.
